Thought: Practice under adverse conditions and building confidence

In his recent podcast, Tim Ferriss outlines his approach to building both confidence and practising for  exams and events like his Ted talk.

On confidence, his approach is very much like Susan Jeffers - you will never be confident, you can only gain confidence through taking action on the thing you fear e.g. if you want to be confident in public speaking, you need to practice public speaking.

He also had some surprising things to say about exam preparation. Practice under adverse conditions. His reasoning goes like this. If the outcome is important to you, then there's a good chance you'd have the jitters, won't sleep well the night before etc.  So practice with this in mind and try to simulate those conditions which you are likely to encounter.